'It seems quite deep not to have caused greater damage.'

'Mm,' she said.

He was obviously bewildered by the operation scars but didn't ask any questions. Something to be said, she thought, for Victorian discretion. He cleaned the wound again 'The great danger now is from infection.' and rebandaged it. Throughout, though the Doctor's face indicated he was still in pain, he lay quietly, unresponsive. This obviously bothered Chiltern. 'Has he been drugged?'

'No.'

'He's deeply deeply unconscious.' unconscious.'

'He's a sound sleeper,' said Anji weakly. She really didn't think that cluing Chiltern in on the Doctor's unearthly origins was the right move at this point. One fantastic, ridiculous idea at a time.

Chiltern washed his hands, emptying the basin into a pail Fitz had brought up earlier. He kept glancing at the Doctor. He looked so sad, Anji thought. What a night of terrible revelations for him. 'Are you hungry? I could sneak down to the kitchen.'

He shook his head. 'No thank you. What about you? You must be tired. Would you like me to sit with him for a while?'

Anji hesitated. She was tempted. Fitz's shift didn't start for another hour. But she didn't feel comfortable not having one or the other of them people who knew exactly who and what he was with the Doctor. 'No. I'm fine. But thank you.'

'Are you certain? You look exhausted.'

'That bad, huh?' She grinned. 'No, really, I'm fine.'

'You oughtn't to wear yourself out for no good reason,' he persisted. 'You don't think it's your fault, do you?'

'No,' she said in surprise. 'Not at all. I'm not guilty,' she went on, a bit insulted. 'I care about him.'

'Of course.' Chiltern was embarrassed. 'Forgive me, I didn't mean to imply any lack of appropriate feeling on your part.'

'That's all tight,' she mumbled. Maybe she did feel guilty, she thought unhappily. Why did being with the Doctor make her so protective of him? She looked at him again, then more closely. Just while she'd been talking with Chiltern, the pain had gone out of his face. And was that... Did she hear something? She bent and put her ear near his lips.

Sure enough, he was humming.

'Stop that!' said Sabbath.

'Sorry,' said the Doctor contritely. 'You know how you get a song on the brain.'

'No I do not.'

'Oh, of course not. My mistake.'

On the theory that any direction he chose would be likely to take them away from this place in which they didn't belong, Sabbath simply started walking. Sure enough, the black wall faded, and he found himself on a steep rocky path. When he looked up all he saw was something that looked like a starless night sky. He hoisted the Doctor to a more comfortable carrying position. 'Any advice?'

'Don't look back.'

Sabbath never afterwards thought consciously about this journey through the unknown night. He had no reason to want to remember it, and on the few occasions that he for some reason tried, it would not be thought of. The experience was somehow too shapeless to focus on, too close to time itself to be comprehensible enough to recall. There was duration, terrible duration, in which the very conception of there being an end was somehow forgotten and unrecoverable. This eternal now was undifferentiated, one step after another on an unchanging path, not even Sisyphean, only repetitive. A single moment experienced forever. Sabbath, who did not believe in hell, knew that this was hell.

He would almost have been glad of the Doctor's conversation, but the Doctor was silent. Was he experiencing the same thing, Sabbath wondered, or did the peculiar temporal elements of his biology make him immune? A long, long while passed before Sabbath allowed himself to understand that it was only his connection to the Doctor, that alien heart that somehow beat impossibly in both their chests, that allowed him to incorporate his surroundings at all instead of going suddenly, screamingly mad. Even as he realised this, the Doctor's voice spoke softly in his ear: 'You wanted to travel in Deep Time. This, where we are, is far deeper.'

'It is terrible,' said Sabbath simply.

'Yes,' the Doctor agreed. 'It is.'

The very survival of his mind was in the power of this fantastic creature he was bearing on his back like the old man of the sea. The Doctor had dragged him into this like a drowning man pulling another under. True, the purpose was to attain something they both wanted, albeit for different reasons, but the Doctor had not consulted him. Had he thought Sabbath would refuse? Or did he just not care? Monstrous egotist, insane risk taker, manipulator and trickster. I have underestimated him, Sabbath thought grimly, a complacent and foolish thing to do, though not yet, fortunately, a mistake. I let myself forget he was not human, judged his capabilities and limits as if he were. If the gentleness was true, I presumed the ruthlessness was a front; if the ruthlessness turned out to be true, then I was sure the gentleness would be revealed as hypocrisy. But neither and both are true. He lives in contradictions as we cannot, and for him they are not contradictions but wholeness.

Good God, he thought with a rare trace of fear, what might a whole race of such beings have been like?

Or was the Doctor unique an aristocrat of time, a prince of coincidence? Was the warping Elizabeth saw around him merely evidence of his peculiar temporal experience and being, or did it indicate something even stranger? It might be as well to kill him sooner rather than later, though there were, to be sure, certain drawbacks to such precipitate action. In any case, Sabbath told himself, he would never again forget what he was dealing with: someone, something, that was radically and completely other other.

'Who else is here?' said the Doctor suddenly.

Sabbath saw nothing. 'There's only rock.'

'Yes? No. Who is it?'

'There is no one.'

'There is.'

'You're hallucinating.'

'Or you're blind. Drawing us upward.'

Towards the light and the air. The light a tiny opalescent blur far above, floating on the surface of the water. The air lost to the cold silence. But he would not die. The fools had done their best, but it would take greater than they to murder him. Towards the light and the air. His lungs crushed against themselves; they would scream if they could. The air and the light. The blood starved for oxygen beat in his head: breathe, breathe! Then the chains slipped from him, the Doctor released him Sabbath surfaced into consciousness, gasping for breath. The afternoon sun lay in a golden bar across the foot of his bed, and the Angel-Maker was gripping his hand as if she would break it.

Chapter Twenty-three.

Bathed and dressed, the Doctor sat on his bed and happily pulled on fresh socks. He was still a bit intoxicated with his return to full life, and everything, even socks, struck him slightly breathless with its richness, its sheer actuality actuality. This will pass, he thought sadly, this wonder and appreciation. Not entirely, but it will pass.

He got a good shove in this less-appreciative direction when the door opened and the Angel-Maker came in.

The Doctor stood up fast, then caught himself. 'Sabbath ready to go yet?' he asked casually.

'It's that he's fixing the course. Sure, and you're a rabbit,' she added disdainfully. 'Jumping up like you did.'

'Excuse me,' said the Doctor with what he thought was, under the circumstances, remarkable patience, 'but you may remember that the last time we met you stabbed me.'

'Only because you willed it.'

'You contributed something to the encounter. I seem to recall, for example, that you brought the knife.'

She shrugged, as if the details were trivial, and sat on the bed.

'Do you want something?' he said.

'It's nothing you need fear.'

'That's extraordinarily reassuring. Thank you so much for telling me. Why are you here?'

'Harming one of you is the same as to harm the other. Why would that be so?'

'We share a heart.'

Her eyes widened and she almost started to cross herself. Instead she shook her head uneasily.

'Why does that bother you? You've seen things as strange one person in many bodies, many people in one body.'

She continued to shake her head, stubbornly. 'The heart is never the same.'

'It's only an organ.'

'It's never the same.'

'Well, in any case,' said the Doctor, in no mood for a biology lecture, 'that's the reason we're mutually mortal. I can't die as long as he's alive.'

'And if he were to die?'

'I don't know,' said the Doctor, uneasy himself now. 'Probably it would also work the other way.' He almost said that, being human, Sabbath might not have his resilience, but decided that would add an unnecessary complication to her attitude towards him.

She looked him up and down, then got up and came over to him. The Doctor held his ground. She examined his face, as if she might find something she hadn't seen there before. 'He says that you've forgotten everything. There's a story that in heaven we drink from a river that lets us forget and so are reborn innocent into God's love. I think it's that for yourself you must be innocent, and that is why you've forgotten. And that your innocence is a cheat and a lie.'

'Perhaps,' said the Doctor expressionlessly.

'Always I was knowing you'd bring harm to him.'

'He yoked himself to me without my consent,' said the Doctor, 'and it's up to him to deal with the consequences. It's not my fault he doesn't understand what this so-called power of mine that he envied is, or that his theft has results he didn't bargain for.'

'It's that he saved your life!' she said furiously.

'He saved my life when he removed my heart,' he retorted, equally angry. 'Taking it for himself wasn't done as any favour to me!'

She looked down briefly, as if acknowledging his point, but only said, 'And so now you're the same.'

'He wouldn't be any happier than I am to hear you put it that way, but on one level yes, we are. The only reason I came to a bit earlier is that my physical stamina is greater.'

She cocked an unflatteringly sceptical eye at him, and he knew she was comparing his slenderness to Sabbath's massive stature. A greyhound to a mastiff. 'It's true,' he said, a shade defensively. 'And the fact that I'm up and about, stab wound and all I might add, means that he's probably in better shape than I am.'

She actually seemed slightly ashamed. 'It's that I thought you were meaning to kill him.'

'I know,' he said. 'I meant for you to. It was my doing. I had to go there, you see.'

'To the back of the wind?'

'Yes.'

'You could have done the thing yourself.'

'I don't know. I've never stabbed myself. If I'd flinched at the last minute, everything would have been ruined.'

'So you made me hurt him!'

'I'm sorry. It had to be done. And you've helped him more than hurt him. That's the way it works, sometimes. He'd be the first to tell you it's not always nice.'

To his surprise, he saw tears on her face. She turned away, wiping at them angrily with her hand. 'You took my feeling for him and turned it to harm him. It's heartless you are, no matter how many beat in your chest.'

'I'm not human.'

She shuddered, and he looked away. 'I'll tell you this,' he said. She shot him a sullen glance. He took her hand and held on to it when she tried to jerk free. 'It is not my intention to hurt Sabbath. I admit, I don't mind it when he gets bounced around a bit it's my own weakness; I let him get to me. But I have never set out to kill him. Thwart him, yes. Annoy him, certainly. Make him jump about in frustration and rage, absolutely. Greatly to be desired. But kill him or harm him wilfully, no.' He released her hand. 'You needn't believe me, but it's the truth. Now I'm going to the station. Come and fetch me if he's ready before I'm back.'

Constance Jane sat on the bench on the railway platform beside Dr Chiltern, thinking of the things she had told him and that he had told her. They were both silent now. He was deep in thought, but she felt as if all thought had left her. All feeling too. She refused to hope. Hope made the damage worse.

Her emptiness was like a thick transparent wall around her. On the far side of it was a fine summer's day, all soft air and golden light. A stand of purple-pink foxgloves bloomed on the other side of the railroad tracks. She stared at them remotely, curious about their beauty, to which she felt she ought to be having some reaction. But what?

Chiltern stood up. Turning, she saw the Doctor hurrying down the platform, clearly relieved at not having missed them. He looked, paradoxically, both wan and invigorated, his step a little weak but his unusual eyes bright. He tipped his hat to her and shook Chiltern's hand.

'I'm glad I didn't miss you.'

'So am I,' said Chiltern. 'Though I had counted on seeing you in London once this is over.'

'You still will. How are you, Miss Jane?'

She smiled faintly. 'I'm fine.'

The Doctor seemed doubtful, but he didn't pursue it. With a polite 'Excuse us' to her, he drew Chiltern to the end of the platform.

'Anji told me how helpful you were when I was... ill. Thank you.'

'It was the least I could do. You seem very much better now,' Chiltern added curiously. The Doctor only smiled. 'What are you going to do now? Go and destroy the machine?' The Doctor nodded. 'Extraordinary,' Chiltern sighed. 'I have absolutely no memory of that Welsh house.'

'No,' said the Doctor sympathetically.

'Is the machine so dangerous?'

'Oh yes.'

'But you said it doesn't even work properly.'

'It doesn't.'

'Why not?'